Oh, no. The causes of the gap are mostly known, and it isn't that guys just can't find books they like. Just like falling men's college enrollment rates aren't because men can't find schools they don't like.
Broadly, US (and to a significant extent world) culture does not put emphasis on male intellectual achievement. We reward our boys much more for their achievements in athletics than we do in academics. Fathers, if they read to their children at all, are more likely to read to their daughters than their sons. Our images of masculinity are about being physically and socially powerful, rather than about knowing and thinking.
Basically, men don't read as much, because we don't teach our boys to value reading.
I don't think you live in the same world I do. Men's reading habits have
fallen dramatically from what they used to be at exactly the same time that that, to the extent that it was
ever true (in my experience it wasn't) it became significantly less true. Men were always encouraged by society to excel, but the idea that intellectual achievement was inferior to athletic achievement is a false just-so story that is more false every year and that's been true for decades.
The War Against Boys has made that just-so story increasingly and obviously false for several decades now.
In 2015, it was reported that women represent 78 percent of the publishing industry overall and 84 percent of the editors. Those numbers have almost certainly risen in the intervening decade, while men increasingly have stopped reading fiction, as the male fiction-reading rate declined from 35.1 percent in 2012 to 27.7 percent in 2022. Female authors also account for more than 50 percent of all books being published, in both the fiction and non-fiction markets. The numbers matter, and if your numbers say that there's a correlation that has nothing to do with your null hypothesis, your null hypothesis is, at beast, very suspect.
Feminists consider these developments to be a success, despite the fact that the overall number of books sold in the USA has not increased concomitant with the 12 percent growth in the population. But they wonder why this success has not been replicated in other industries. The answer is pretty simple. Unlike other industries, success in the publishing industry is mostly, though not quite entirely,
given to an author rather than earned by her on her own merits. Every step of the publishing process, from book contract to literary award, is carefully curated by a very small group of people, mostly women, who control who is permitted to publish, what the print runs will be, what the bookstores will carry, and where the books will be displayed in on the shelves.
Men don't read because the entire publishing industry isn't interesting in selling books to men, and watching the numbers of male readers fall in realtime as these changes have happened do not support your theory. (Which, granted, I realize isn't
your theory. It's a prevailing narrative that is kind of ubiquitous in the world of people who pay attention to this kind of thing. But it absolutely does not match the data.)
